More than words © [SamBucky]

More than words.

(Note: This is definitely not canon complaint, but it does follow the line after the show. I really don't think Bucky ever chooses to keep quiet or Sam hides his emotions, but seeing Bucky's conflicting looks in TWS and CW brought me here).

***

More than words.

Even when it was all over, the paperwork and the super soldiers, and Bucky returned to Brooklyn to get rid of his apartment, he still didn't answer the text messages. But he was no longer ignoring him, instead Bucky would call Sam and ask some idiocy like 'All right?', because of course he wouldn't bother to read the message.

Sam didn't take it personally, they spent a lot of time together before Bucky came back to Brooklyn, they had talked about everything and nothing, and now Sam could really see Bucky. Not the one Steve rememberedwith nostalgic eyes and certainly not the killer Sam had met, no, this one was the Bucky who was knowing himself. And to be honest? Maybe Sam likes him.

But he didn't say anything while Bucky was in Louisiana and while they were talking on the phone, because Bucky was getting to know himself and it just didn't seem like a good idea for Sam to interfere with his own feelings.

So, his unanswered messages didn't stop and the calls continued, sometimes they were short, just to give a silly little summary of their day, and other times they stretched into the early morning, when the whispered words managed to quench the noisy nightmares, when the anecdotes worked like bedtime tales, when there was static witnessing smiles and laughter, and when they were just talking about nonsense because it seemed too early to hang up.

And then Bucky responded to his usual message of 'Hey, how was your day?' with a 'Good. Mrs. Davis came back from her vacation, so tomorrow I'll leave the apartment'. Sam knew immediately that something was wrong, something that was unrelated to the response message.

'Can I call you?' wrote quickly. Sam spent a couple of minutes watching as the three points on Bucky's side appeared and disappeared until he finally received a message.

'I can't speak', Bucky replied.

Almost immediately he received another message: 'Will you be going to DC soon?'.

'Yes, you'll be there?' he asked, with his fingers anxiously pounding the sides of his phone.

'Yes. I can only think of that place to settle', received Sam. He felt a turn in his stomach when read the words, couldn't he think of another place? Hadn't he thought of him? Not necessarily with Sam, just there, in Louisiana.

'I'll be there tomorrow morning, you?', he wrote instead of typing every one of the doubts that were accumulating in his head.

'Before noon'.

And the following messages were simply superficial details, whether Sam still had a house there, whether Mary Hill could know they were in DC, whether they were somewhere before Sam's house, and a bunch of other things that kept plunging Sam's stomach into a bad feeling.

'Take care of yourself, Buck.'

'You too, Sam.'

It wasn't a hunch like the ones he had before getting involved in a fight, this was a bad feeling that something wasn't right, something was out of place, and that the hunch was about Bucky didn't help Sam's dream at all. On the contrary, he had nightmares until the sun peeked over the horizon.

The truth is Sam had no plans to go to DC anytime soon, but he wanted and needed to see Bucky, just to make sure he was okay. It was something slightly alien to his desire to see him because Sam likes Bucky and wants to see him all the time.